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The Finnish Disease

June 1, 2015 7:38 amJune 1, 2015 7:38 am

A followup to my post inspired by troubles in Finland: it’s worth emphasizing just how bad Finland’s performance has been. For
Finns, the great depression they remember is the slump at the beginning of the 1990s, driven by a combination of a bursting housing bubble and the collapse of the Soviet Union next door. The result was a very nasty
slump, and a delayed recovery. But this time, although the slump in per capita GDP never got quite as deep, has been far more persistent:

Photo

Depressed FinnsCredit OECD

Why can’t Finland recover this time? Debt is not a problem; borrowing costs are very low. But it’s all about the euro straitjacket. In 1990 the country could and did devalue, achieving a rapid gain in
competitiveness. This time not, so that there is no quick way to adjust to adverse shocks:

Photo

Credit

This shouldn’t come as a surprise; it’s the core of the classic Milton Friedman argument for flexible exchange rates, and in turn for the tradeoff at the core of optimum currency area theory. The trouble
in Finland is what everyone expected to go wrong with the euro.

What’s going on in Greece represents a whole additional level of hurt, which nobody saw coming. But it’s important, I think, to realize that even countries that didn’t borrow a lot, didn’t
experience large capital inflows, basically did nothing wrong by the official criteria, are nonetheless suffering in a major way.